Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Even with a detector, you're likely to remain confused by the bewildering array of terms
and units with which radiation and radioactive dosage are measured. There are rads and
rems, sieverts and grays, roentgens, curies and becquerels, around which buzz a swarm of
attending coulombs, ergs, and joules. You might want to know the disintegration rate of a
radioactive material, or its potential to ionize the air around it, or the amount of energy it
can impart to solid matter, or the amount of energy it actually does impart to the living tis-
sue of hapless organisms—such as Chernobyl tourists—and on and on.
And then it all depends on how quickly you get your dose. In this, radiation is analogous
to certain other poisons, such as alcohol. A single shot of bourbon every weekend for a year
is hardly dangerous. But fifty shots on a single night will kill you.
Finally, it matters which
part
of your body gets irradiated. Limb? Count yourself lucky.
Guts? Not so much.
So it's no wonder that radiation is so mysterious and frightening, and that it features in
the backstories of so many comic book monsters. It's invisible, deadly, cosmic, extremely
confusing, and rides shotgun with the nuclear apocalypse. The stuff is just spooky, and
if—like me—you're never going to have an intuitive understanding of its dosage and true
risks, you might as well ease off on worrying about it so much. The purpose of the detect-
or, then, is not to better understand the danger in your environment, but to gather up your
anxiety and bundle it into a single number on a small digital readout, so you can carry your
fear more efficiently.
Oh—and the tip for repelling gamma rays is that you can't.
Olena had a plan. “Let's go to Karavayevi Dachi,” she said. “Electronics black market.”
What Manhattan's Chinatown is to food, Kiev's Karavayevi Dachi is to electronics. It
was early afternoon when we arrived. Metal stalls lined its alleys, roller-fronts thrown up
to reveal jumbles of electronic components and devices. Men with rough, sun-cured faces
sat at wooden folding tables strewn with vacuum tubes, transformers, electrical plugs, com-
puter chips, adapters. The husks of car stereos hung in bunches, banana-like. It seemed
doubtful that we would find a working radiation detector here among the tangled heaps of
wires and transistors, and as we went from stall to stall, the conversations followed a pat-
tern that always ended in “nyet.”
One man claimed to have a detector at home that he would sell us for only 150
hryvnia—about thirty bucks. The catch was that it could only detect beta radiation. Forget
it, dude. Any simpleton knows that beta particles—which can be blocked by regular
